


Easy Living

by NervousAsexual



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Amnesia, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 14:43:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16020065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Nick Valentine is losing himself, a little at a time, to a series of hard reboots. He doesn't know why they keep happening and he doesn't know how to stop them. Instead of waiting he opts to make a pilgrimage out to where Jennifer Lands died, and he learns more about his condition than he ever bargained for.





	Easy Living

The Valentine Detective Agency signs were an eyesore. That was what Myrna said. Was saying. Currently. On the other side of the wall.

Nick could hear her out there complaining to Ellie. Couldn’t do much about it. Wasn’t sure he could get up off the bed.

Didn’t remember lying down. Didn’t usually do that. Wasn’t much point in it, or even in having a bed, seeing as he didn’t sleep. But it was like the cigarettes and the drinks. Made him feel more human. Less like a toaster oven with basic combat abilities.

Went to pull his hat down over his eyes but it wasn’t there. Spotted it hanging on the bedpost. Weird not to have kept it closer.

Only one thing he could think--ran an overnight diagnostic that ended in a hard reboot. Seemed like he’d had a lot of those recently. Probably should have been grateful things were so slow. Wouldn’t want a hard reboot to happen out in the field.

He ran just a quick diagnostic to make sure everything was in working order. Mobility looked good. Hadn’t found any new blips in the sensory processors.

“If McDonough were half the leader he bragged about being he would’ve tossed you synths out to the raiders,” Myrna was saying.

Clearly she wasn’t going anywhere. Nick sighed and rolled over. It was time to start the day, if for no other reason than to give Ellie something to smile about and Myrna a reason to complain.

“I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you about that,” Ellie said.

“Are you kidding? He don’t want a damn thing to do with any of us.”

As he rounded the corner into the office he caught Ellie’s eye and gave her a wink. She looked down at her cluttered desk. He knew how that went. Myrna could do that to people sometimes.

“Well,” Ellie said, “maybe his secretary…?”

“Ha!”

Ellie flinched at that.

“She wouldn’t notice if the mayor was being kidnapped by synths right under her nose.”

Nick stepped around so Myrna could see him. “Morning, Myrna. Surprised to see you here.”

Myrna swiveled toward him. “Why? Ain’t I allowed to bring complaints like the rest of the city?”

“Of course. I’ve got too much respect for you to do anything else. It just seems like this is a good way to get synthed, going into a dark alley where a known synth lives.”

“Well…” Myrna said, like she hadn’t thought of that. She scrambled out the door.

Ellie watched her go and Nick watched Ellie. She wasn’t looking her regular peppy self.

“She’s lonely,” he said.

“Myrna?”

“Can’t get close to anybody in case they might be a synth. Us, though, we’re a known quantity. Or at least I am.”

Ellie tapped her pen against the desk.

“How come you can always see the good in people?” she asked at last.

“Hard-acquired habit.” And it was. Trusting didn’t come easily to him. Probably something left over from the pre-war Nick. From all he could tell, that guy hadn’t exactly been bursting with rainbows and sunshine.

“Well, it’s annoying. Stop doing it.”

And she started to cry.

“Ah geez.” Just seeing her like that sent uncomfortable prickles all through the sensors of his neck. “I’m sorry, El.”

She put her head down on the desk. “I hate this,” she sobbed, each word punctuated with a hiccup.

“I know.” In fact, he didn’t. Myrna’s complaints had never seemed to bother her before. There must have been an outside factor. A date gone wrong? Bad news from Goodneighbor? He tried to put his good hand, the one that still looked like a hand, on her shoulder, but she violently shrugged him off.

“I hate this and I hate myself.”

“What? Why?” He knew that how people saw themselves didn’t always reflect reality--how else could you explain the Brotherhood of Steel and their obsession with honor--but there was so much good in Ellie that it seemed impossible for her not to have noticed.

“I just do.”

His next idea--or Nick’s, it could be hard to tell the difference--was to get out of there, but he forced himself to stay a moment longer.

“Well,” he told her, even though it went against his first instinct, “for what it’s worth, I love you.”

She just cried harder.

Wasn’t sure what he expected. Not that. Was it a chemical thing? He knew organics could have chemical imbalances that made them hurt. Gen 3 synths could as well, but he was lucky enough to have missed the debut of that particular feature. “Ellie, can I get you anything that would help?”

She kept crying.

“Something to eat? You want breakfast?”

“Leave me alone.”

So he did. He pulled on his coat and hat and headed out.

A hard reboot was rough on the system. Everything felt a little heavier after, like he’d gotten waterlogged in the rain. It felt a little like the hangover after a migraine. Except he’d never had migraines. Somebody must have, because how else would he know? But he couldn’t think who…

He paused at the schoolhouse, leaned up against the building while he searched through old memories. Took a minute, longer than usual. Jenny. Jenny had the migraines. Weird that he’d had to dig for a memory of her.

He made his way out to the noodle stand. Takahashi was still serving up bowls to a morning crowd, whirring along at a steady pace. Nick heaved himself up onto one of the stools. Neither the robotic chef nor the crowd paid him any mind. He could feel eyes on him--probably Myrna lurking off in her shop. He gave a little half wave in her direction. Didn’t make contact or look over. No sense getting her too riled up.

He sunk his head down in his good hand. Going back over his memories there seemed to be a few gaps, and they weren’t just restricted to Jenny. Those hard reboots were really doing a number on his system. Ellie probably had an obvious reason to be upset, and he’d probably lost the data.

Takahashi swiveled to face him. “Nan-ni shimasho-ka?”

“Proper maintenance for once. But barring that I’ll settle for an order of noodles.”

Takahashi took his caps, unceremoniously deposited a cup of noodles on the bar, and turned to the next customer.

“Thanks,” Nick called after him, but of course there was no response.

He thought about eating, or at least pretending to eat. There was something comforting about the act even if it wasn’t really necessary. But the noodles were still warm. It’d be kinder to run them back to Ellie instead. He cradled the cup of noodles in one hand and struggled off the stool. Damn things were a pain at the best of times.

At least now his control was a little better, a little tighter. He could walk without falling over in a heap.

Still took it slow, though. Diamond City was starting to come into its own, and the market was starting to fill up. There was already a line at Arturo’s. The neighborhood eyebot passed him on one side, playing “Easy Living,” and a gaggle of schoolkids stumbled into him on the other side. He couldn’t help feeling a little lonely. Something about Billie Holiday always did that to him.

“I never regret,” he mumbled, adjusting his own internal scanner to better pick up DCR. “The years I’m giving, they’re easy to give. When you’re in love I’m happy to do whatever I do for you.”

Jenny used to love this song. She’d sing it in the morning on the rare occasions she was up before he was, just stood in front of the mirror and brushed her hair and smiled at him. Smiled at Nick, anyway.

He felt the smile on his face before he realized he was smiling. At least that wasn’t a memory he’d lost in the shuffle.

Before he could make it inside the ghost of a tear touched his cheek, and he stopped in the alley to wipe it away. He never cried--he didn’t have the ability to cry--but the parts of him that were left over from Nick Valentine still remembered. That Nick had hated crying (he leaned against the concrete wall and closed his eyes just for a moment), hated any kind of negative feeling. But after the world went to hell in a handbasket Nick Valentine the synth had learned the hard way that anything you could hold onto had value. He’d never met Jenny Lands. Despite how real the memories were, he’d never so much as held her hand. But she was something that made him feel a little more real.

Ellie was silent when he came into the office, not crying, not talking, nothing.

“I got ya… oh.” He stopped in the doorway. There was a reason she was quiet. Her head was resting on the desk. She was asleep.

Carefully he put the cup of noodles down just beyond her folded arms, where she wouldn’t knock them over when she woke up. Her desk was more cluttered than usual with things that wouldn’t take well to having noodles dumped on them. Lots of files--more, if he was being truthful, than were really needed, given the amount of work he wasn’t doing--some kind of diagnostic board of the sort he’d seen over at Arturo’s, configured to work with his own telemetry. Poor kid was worrying about him, he realized. Whatever was causing all these hard reboots had her more spooked than he was himself.

A file lay open in front of her, a photograph clipped to its cover. He couldn’t remember ever seeing it before, which raised the question of where she found it. With the pads of his skeletal fingers he pulled the file toward him. The photo was old and faded, and there was something familiar about the young black woman it pictured, and the way she posed with the poster faded into the background.

Across the bottom of the picture, in his own stiff printed letters, were the words “Jennifer Lands.”

If he’d had hairs on the back of his neck they would have stood up on end. It was Jenny. There was no mistaking her, not in two hundred years or a million. But he’d thought there were no surviving pictures of her. They had all been destroyed when the bombs dropped. And yet this was his handwriting…

No. He remembered now. He’d found a picture. In a file in the back of a cop shop. He’d found the file on her and her death--her murder. But he couldn’t remember the image. He remembered seeing her, but not what he saw.

He pushed the file back.

How much more? he wondered grimly, shuffling back to his own bed. How many more resets was he going to go through? How many more before it erased everything important to him? The part of him that was pre-war went to the worst case scenario. He would reset again and again until he was nothing more than any other Gen 2 synth, a blank slate no better than a thumb drive that could walk. Or, worse, a Gen 2 following orders. A Gen 2 that would murder every organic it saw.

Maybe Myrna was right to worry.

He dropped down to sit against the bed. What was this, anyway? Planned obsolescence? Another of the Institute’s failsafes? Or was this just the natural progression of things? That was possible. Ghouls went feral and synths self-destructed. Just a fact of life that couldn’t be helped.

His hand brushed against more papers, his notes on that “mysterious stranger” legend. He’d left them on the floor. And not just them. He could see more junk shoved up under his bed. It had been a rough week. No, more than a week. It had been rough for a long, long time.

He had to get out of this city. He shoved himself back up to his feet and looked around. Where was he going to go? What was he going to do when he got there? Hell if he knew, but at this point…

He’d go to Jenny.

The thought calmed him a little. He didn’t know where Jenny was buried--or maybe he’d forgotten--but he could go to the place where she’d taken her last breath. He still remembered that. The spuckie shop. He could go there.

He trudged back around to the front of the office. Ellie was still sleeping, her noodles going cold. He felt like a piece of shit, making her worry like this. She looked so small and so sad, and so cold and tired. He wished he could protect her from everything, and he could barely even protect himself.

He shrugged off his trenchcoat and draped it over her shoulders.

“I’m just going out for a bit,” he said, but though she nestled deeper into the coat she didn’t respond.

During the entire walk around to the gate he thought of Jenny, as many thoughts as he could manage, as many details as he could remember. The ones he thought of came to him quickly, but who could tell what he’d already forgotten?

He leaned against the stadium seats as he waited for the gate to come up, and he remembered crying.

On the other side of the gate he was surprised to see a familiar face. The tri-corner hat was gone, and the face looked more haggard than before, but even in this shape he could tell it was Preston.

“Hey,” he said as Preston limped by. “Still out doin’ the Commonwealth proud?”

Preston glanced over at him, but as soon as their eyes met his face screwed up as if he were about to cry and he turned away. Nick immediately regretted saying anything. There must have been something important he’d forgotten.

“Fuck off, Valentine,” a sharp voice returned. Piper came up alongside Preston, hooked her arm around him, and steered him away.

“I… I don’t… What did I do?”

Piper turned to him and her eyes were hard as the steel in his bones. “Nora…”

“It’s not his fault,” Preston mumbled. His voice was softer than usual.

“Agree to disagree,” Piper said, and she guided him back into the city.

He walked for hours trying to puzzle that one out. It felt like trying to put together pieces of a puzzle that had been sitting at the bottom of a lake for two hundred years. He couldn’t even remember why the two of them would have known one another.

By the time he made it into Back Bay night was falling and he could hear the super mutants out starting to move around. He’d been walking for hours and was still so far from where he’d expected to be. The despair was already welling up somewhere inside him, and something else too. He could feel the start of that migraine hangover feeling again. Fantastic.

He stumbled around in the growing dark, only vaguely familiar with where he was. He could smell smoke. He had to be near Trinity Church. There was nothing good in there, only super mutants, but like a moth to a lamp he went to what he knew.

Rounding a corner brought out a glow in the distance. Had to be that cookfire that always burned at the church. If he could only get there, maybe he could get his bearings.

He followed the light down a set of stairs and walked directly into the crouching super mutant.

It stood with a displeased growl, reaching for… for something, and knocked Nick to the ground with one swipe. He reached for his gun, ran through all the possible scenarios, and cursed himself when he remembered the stimpacks, still back in Diamond City in his coat pocket. A breeze whipped through, setting his tie to flapping. He brought up his arm to protect himself, and the super mutant paused.

“Puny metal man not dead yet,” it said doubtfully.

Instead of adrenaline it was coolant rushing through his veins, but Nick could have sworn he felt it run out. He let his arm fall back. “Strong?”

The super mutant grunted in assent.

“Oh, thank god.” He sank down onto the ground for a moment. “Didn’t count on runnin’ into you here, big guy.”

“Strong look for milk of human kindness.”

He noted a hint of defensiveness in the mutant’s voice. “Of course.”

“When find, Strong not share with metal man.”

“Sure, sure.” He got back to his feet. “Finding it on the ground, were ya? Or just settling in for the night?”

“Strong not settle!”

But, he noticed, the mutant did crouch back down. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

Strong glared up at him, his eyes glittering in the half-light from Nick’s eyes.

“Hey, I wanna ask you a favor.” He could feel the migraine hangover growing. “Just for kicks and grins. I need to run a diagnostic. Keep an eye out for me?”

Strong said nothing. Nick thought of all the emotions Piper wore on her face and despaired.

Nora.

“Strong make no promises,” Strong said at last.

“Good enough.” He closed his eyes and set a more thorough diagnostic running, and, because there was nothing else he could do, ran a search for memories of a Nora.

Recent memories were a flop--all he found there was Piper’s voice, accusatory and bitter. Nothing tagged in the archived Diamond City files. Nothing in the Goodneighbor files, and nothing co-tagged with Piper or Preston. Hardly anything there to begin with, he realized. There were serious gaps in memories related to both of them.

Then he expanded the search to surrounding areas. Anything at all...

And something triggered.

He came up with one file, fragmented, cut off from any connected memories. Whatever it was that was causing his memories to be wiped, it hadn’t found this one.

He opened it up and was immediately awash in blood.

He felt, or Nick Valentine felt, or somebody felt, a wave of panic and despair crush them down. The bleeding, stop the bleeding, stop… No, it was only a memory, he just needed to pull out of it, put it back where it came from, never touch it again, he tried, he backed away and as his body shut down he felt himself fall

 

He felt the warmth first. Before his eyes came back online he felt the warmth of being close to another body.

Jenny?

Eyes back on. Nope. Not Jenny. Not even close.

“Roboman dead yet?” Strong asked.

“Not quite,” he mumbled, not quite operating at enough of a capacity to do anything other than lie there against Strong’s chest with his hands hanging down low enough to scrape the ground. “Hard reboot. Seems like I can’t run diagnostics without triggering one of ‘em.”

Strong scoffed. “Metal man stupid.”

He tested out his arm and got it to move. Maybe this one hadn’t been so bad.

“Stupid to do thing that always hurts.”

He had to chuckle at that. “That’s me, big guy. Too rock stupid to do anything else.”

Strong got to his feet and set Nick upright as well.

“Off to go find that milk of human kindness?” Nick asked him.

“Metal man find Strong after. Strong will crush like melon.”

Nick nodded. His hat stuck out at a weird angle where his face had been leaning against Strong’s chest. “Guess I’ll see you then.”

Strong gave him a solemn nod, and the two of them went their separate ways.

He headed off southeast, pausing once to adjust the scanner. DCR came in a little fuzzy in the Back Bay area. He could just make out Travis’ voice, fading in and out, and then the music started up. That came in a little clearer. Or maybe it was just his memory that made the song sound so much stronger.

“Living for you,” Billie Holiday crooned, “is easy living. It’s easy to live when you’re in love and I’m so in love…”

Off in the distance he could hear gunfire--probably raiders; in this area, it usually was--but it was far enough away that he wasn’t too worried. If they turned into a problem he’d know about it. Somehow raiders weren’t as sneaky as, say, an assaultron with stealth capabilities, or a feral popping up from the ground to bite off your face.

When he reached the place where it happened, Billie Holiday was long gone, and he’d clicked off the radio anyway. He didn’t feel like music. Not here.

He came around the back, under the overpass, and went around the shop to the bullet holes still marking the place where she fell. He crouched down and traced them with the slender metal of his fingers. Nick should have been there. He should have been there. He should never have left Chicago. He should have taken Jenny out of this mess. He should have done something.

“Nick?”

He turned, half-expecting to see Jenny, but it was Ellie who stood an awkward distance behind him, rocking slowly back and forth on her heels.

“Hey, kid.” He touched his face where he could almost feel the tears. “How’d you find me?”

Ellie folded her arms tight around herself. Her arms were bare, and there was no sign of his coat. “You always come here.”

Did he? Must have forgotten that too. He remembered being here after Jenny died. He remembered…

He remembered a trapdoor that led below ground.

“Nick?” Ellie asked again, but he couldn’t remember why he knew anything about the spuckie shop. It was just a symbol, a marker on the map of his mind. He went around her, eyes turned to the floor, and sure enough, there in the middle of the room was a grimy hatch built into the floor. It was padlocked closed. “Nick, I want to go home.”

“You can go.” He crouched down and turned the lock over in his hands. He couldn’t pick it. Didn’t have the skill, not like… who was it who was always able to pick locks?

“There’s raiders, and I… I don’t want to walk back alone.”

“Then wait a damn minute and let me think.” Christ, the migraine hangover was back and worse than ever. It felt like the whole world was standing still and not in a good way. Felt like being back at that co-op out north of Natick PD, Starshine or Sunlight or whatever the hell it was called. Felt like walking straight into an ambush. He stood up and held out an arm to keep her back and with the other he shot the lock off the hatch.

Ellie yelped. He looked back to make sure she wasn’t hurt, that nothing had ricocheted and hit her, but she was looking out the door at the street. Good. He kicked the shattered padlock out of the way and opened up the trapdoor.

Long way down. 

One step at a time he climbed down the ladder into the dark. Ellie was rattling around up above him but he didn’t bother looking up. There was something about this place that made him feel worse. Maybe it was the smell. It smelled like decay and mold and other things that grew in the dark and the damp.

And he remembered… he remembered the numbers. 195372406. Couldn’t remember what they meant. Remembered the numbers themselves clear as day.

He let himself down the last few rungs into a speakeasy. Good enough place for one. Rathole in a rathole. The ladder still rattled above his head, and he looked up to see Ellie descending after him. He helped her down onto the floor.

“Please,” she said, taking hold of his shirt. “Nick? Please, let’s just get out of here.”

“Christ, Ellie. You don’t gotta be here if you don’t want to.” There was a tunnel in the back, leading out in the direction of the subway. Had he been here before?

“I can’t go by myself. Don’t make me.”

“If you won’t go then come on. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.” A little pang spread out from his insides. How could he know that for sure?

“It’s not your fault,” a voice whispered to him.

Nora?

“It’s not your fault what he did. It’s not even Nick’s fault. Nobody held a gun to Eddie’s head and told him to kill her. That’s all on him. He’s the one who’s responsible.”

He stumbled in the dark, into Ellie, and the two of them collided with the wall.

“Nick, come on, please. There’s nothing down here.” Ellie tugged at his arm.

He touched his face and was as disappointed as ever to find the tears were all in his head. “What is that? That a door?”

“Don’t.”

It was. An electronic door set way back in the tunnel, locked up tighter than Diamond City during election season. A number pad was set alongside it.

Numbers, huh?

He ignored Ellie’s protests and ran his fingers over the keypad. Slowly he typed in 195372406. Hell of a thing, how he could remember that and not a damn thing about Nora.

The keypad glowed softly, and the door clicked open.

The room was lit up and the radio played “Easy Living.” The room was dark and silent. He remembered the ghoul. He remembered nothing.

“Please,” Ellie begged, tears in her eyes, but he looked away and the blood washed over him.

Ghouls went feral. Ghouls went feral and synths self-destructed and you couldn’t threaten either one of them with a gun.

Nora went in first. She was scared, made him stand back and kept giving him little pep talks like she was gonna save his soul. But the thing neither of them considered was that after 200 years buried alive in a twelve by twelve room Eddie Winter might not be all there. Nora walked into the room, and he heard Billie Holiday’s nostalgic voice and a low growl, and then Winter was on her.

He put the gun against Winter’s head--against the ghoul’s head; there was nothing left of Eddie Winter and hadn’t been for years--and pulled the trigger but instead of the relief he had hoped for he felt sick and he went to Nora and held her in his arms while she bled to death with her throat torn out in some godforsaken hole in the ground without her kid, without her plans for the Commonwealth’s future, without the people she’d found to love her.

“Nick?”

There was no blood, no music, no light. He was standing in a room as purged of context as his mind was purged of the memories. He’d almost think it was a dream, except…

It wasn’t his fault, Preston had said.

Agree to disagree.

Ellie was pulling his arm again and he let her.

“I didn’t want this,” she told him. “I wanted to help you.”

Maybe he should have thanked her. He didn’t know what for. All he knew was that he knew nothing.

 

Ellie led him home and he made no purposeful movements. He’d forgotten and now he couldn’t stop remembering. Nora. Just like Jenny. She’d had plans. She was gonna change the world. And he’d killed her, as surely as if he’d cut her throat himself. She was dead because of him.

He hated those hard reboots and holes in his memories more than ever. He didn’t deserve to forget. Piper didn’t get to forget, Preston didn’t get to forget. Ellie (he realized now) didn’t get to forget. He should have to live with himself and what he did.

As Ellie struggled with the lock he leaned up against the alley wall and closed his eyes for a moment. Shoulda been him. He shouldn’t have let her go first. Shouldn’t have asked her for help. Should have taken care of Winter on his own. Should have…

“Come on,” Ellie said softly, tugging on his sleeve like a little kid.

Christ. He couldn’t even remember when Nora had died. How long ago…?

“Come on, Nick. You’ll feel better if you lay down for a minute or two.”

She led him around to the bed. There wasn’t anything he could do in response. He barely even noticed. She gave him a little push, back onto the bed, and he just lay there and looked up at the ceiling. His fault. Nora was dead and it was his fault.

“Don’t,” Ellie said. “Please don’t.” She took the hat from him and hung it on the bedpost, just out of his reach. He closed his fingers around a handful of the blanket. “It’s not your fault.”

Agree to disagree.

She sighed and went back out into the office.

He tried to remember as much as he could, before he ended up losing it all again. Nora. Her short dark hair, her gap-toothed smile, the way she schemed and plotted to find a way to make the forces of the Commonwealth play nice with each other. The day she walked out of that vault was the best day the Commonwealth ever saw.

And now, because of him, it meant nothing.

Was that why he kept rebooting?

He ran it all back in his mind. The last time it happened, when he was out at Trinity Church, he’d remembered something. It must have triggered the reboot. What else could it have been? He must have remembered something about Nora, or about… He kept doing rebooting so he didn’t have to remember.

But that didn’t explain everything. There was still something off, something that didn’t quite add up.

Ellie came back around the corner, her eyes sad and the diagnostic board in her hands. As he looked up at her he noticed as if for the first time his hat hanging on the bedpost.

If he could have gotten the willies, he would have had them. “Ellie?”

She didn’t say anything. She turned his head with one hand and opened up the panel on the back.

“Ellie, why…?” He turned back so she’d have to stay the hell out of his head. Somebody had already done enough damage.

“I’m just trying to help,” she said softly. Her face was pale and expressionless.

“El, please tell me it’s not what it looks like.”

She said nothing.

“Tell me it was an accident. Please, kid, tell me something.”

“It was like this for weeks, Nick.”

He raised himself up on one arm to try and look her in the eyes but she wouldn’t hold his gaze.

“I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t do anything about it, you just… laid there and blamed yourself. So I fixed it. I tried to fix it.”

“No, you opened up my head and screwed around in it to make me forget.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Nick! I saw it. When I went in to… to fix it I saw what happened. You didn’t hold a gun to her head. You told her you needed help and she volunteered. That was all.”

He felt sick to hear Nora’s words coming out of her mouth. _You didn’t hold a gun to…_ Maybe not. But if he hadn’t asked her for help, if he’d just done what needed to be done on his own, if he’d just listened to her when she told him he was better than that, if he’d refused to let the hurt fester for two hundred damn years, maybe she’d still be alive.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Another woman he’d loved was gone, and this time he couldn’t blame it on Nick Valentine. “You didn’t have any right.”

She sighed. “That’s what you keep telling me.”

What? “How many times has this happened?”

“You’re the detective. You keep figuring things out. But, Nick, it doesn’t have to be like this.”

“You’re right. Not this time.”

He got to his feet and focused on getting to the door. Didn’t have a clue where he was going to go once he was out of here. Just knew he had to go now.

“Nick, stop it!”

He kept moving until he heard the distinctive click of a gun being cocked. When he looked back she was holding a pipe pistol in her hands, pointing it straight at him. “You really think a gun’s gonna stop me? I’ve had worse.”

“Yeah,” she said sadly. “I figured as much.”

And she put the gun to her head.

He had to stop himself from lurching toward her. Her finger was on the trigger. One wrong move, one accidental bump and she’d be gone too. “Ellie, what the hell.”

“One of us gets to forget,” she said, and started to cry. “You can chose to forget. I don’t get that choice. If I can’t take knowing this is my only way out.”

“Jesus Christ.” He ran his hands over his scalp.

“You’re a good man, Nick. I’m not going to live knowing I let you do this to yourself.”

“What do you want from me?” he asked, but they both already knew the answer. Her eyes were fixed on his bed.

Part of him, the part that was still nihilistic pre-war Nick Valentine, told him to go. Let her destroy herself if that was really what she wanted. It wasn’t his job to save her. But the part that was everything he’d spent the last two centuries rebuilding wouldn’t let him leave. No matter what she’d done Ellie was a good kid. He wouldn’t be able to live with having the blood of three good people on his hands, not when there was something he could have done to prevent it.

“Alright.” He held up his hands so she could see he wasn’t going to fight her. “Alright, Ellie. If that’s what it takes.”

She was crying so hard he was afraid her hand would slip.

“Look, I’m doin’ what you want.” He lay down on the bed and turned his head so she had access to the back panel again. “Why don’t you put the gun down?”

She held it there for a moment longer, like she was undecided, like maybe this was the best option she could think of, but then she let up on the gun and put it down on the floor and looked at it, still sobbing.

“There’s a good girl. C’mere.”

She came over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed and sobbed, and he held her tight.

“It’s okay. You were trying to help. I know. I know.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered into his ear, and too late did he feel her hand at the panel in his head.

“Ellie,” he tried to say, but she tugged gently on some wires and he felt himself falling.

It would be okay, he tried to tell himself. The hard reboots hurt, but not as bad as this. Maybe she was right. Maybe it would be a blessing not to know. He couldn’t fight back, couldn’t move, couldn’t talk. He could see what was happening. Ellie was leaning over him and her hand was in his head but he couldn’t understand why, everything felt off-kilter, and when he tried to ask her what was happening he found he couldn’t speak, and then the darkness gave way and he wasn’t sure he could get up off the bed.

Weird. Didn’t usually lie down. Wasn’t much point. After all, he didn’t sleep.


End file.
